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Ricardo (4s): Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes podcast today. I like to discuss one thing that is becoming, I would say a permanent concern in my mind. The Project is Complex Enough, do not make your Management even more complex, let me tell you there is a natural trend. When we see the project or the initiative becoming more and more Complex what do you do? You tend to create a very cumbersome process to manage it. You create layers of different controls. People reporting to people that report to people that report to people. And in the end, you start spending most of your energy doing meetings, preparing reports with a small amount of time.
Ricardo (50s): effort and focus, destined on building the product on managing that specific initiative. So it's very important. If your project is complex, you don't need to transform your Management in a complex environment. You need to simplify So one thing that I used to love to say is that If 10 people are saving the word one is really doing the work. And nine of them are just checking. If the one that is saving, the word is saving using the proper form. It Doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. So what you need and look, this is not. And an exclusivity of the agile mindset, it's agility, it's above and beyond the method, it's an agility mindset.
Ricardo (1m 38s): How I can have a flat structure, how I can remove bureaucracy, no matter if I am using waterfall and building a nuclear power plant, or if I'm doing the next release of my software for social media, did you get that? So you need to think what I can do to kill bureaucracy. What I can do to kill bureaucracy, what I can do to streamline process of approval process, this decision process. So it doesn't make sense. I remember nine years ago when I got certified in prince and one of the principals of prince is Management by exception. And that it's one of the things I love most about their process.
Ricardo (2m 21s): If you manage the exception, you don't manage. You don't do meetings every day just to say everything is fine. And then, next day, everything is fine. You are just losing time. What do you do? You do a meeting If there is something that is exceptional, that requires a different course of action, or otherwise people will stay doing zoom calls or doing meetings all around the clock. And they do not have time to do the actual work. Imagine a development software project, you have 10 people really doing the code and 90 people taking a look. If the 10 people that are building the code, they are producing the relevant documentation of the code they're producing.
Ricardo (3m 4s): It doesn't make sense. Of course, I'm not saying That documenting the code is not important, please. It's very important, but you need to agree with me. That is less important than developing the code. Because if you don't develop the code, there is nothing for you to put in a document. So think about it. So we need to have a proactive behavior of simplification. What I can do to streamline process most of the company, even more in incumbent companies, they suffer dramatically because they became Complex. They became so cumbersome that they cannot get the job done because the process is so complex. so bureaucratic Most of the governments are the same they became so Complex so bureaucratic that just nothing happens because for you to move, you need to have so many layers that you don't get the job done, and you can see Today with COVID-19.
Ricardo (4m 0s): So let Simplify, there is only one final thing I wanted to share with you about that is that when you start simplifying, you are empowering people and you are giving people more responsibility. And this is a challenge because you need to make sure that your teams are ready to take this additional responsibility because one of the key principles of this agile mindset, or for example, the startup mindset is that people feel accountable for the work. So you don't need to supervise too much. You don't need to check everything because you trust people and people are trustable to do the work. If you don't have that, then it's a more complex environment.
Ricardo (4m 42s): So you need to nurture and create an environment that people feel empowered to make the decisions. This is how you can make transformation work. This is how you can make a project be delivered, and this is how you can succeed. If you look successful companies and compare with poor performing companies, you will see that one of the key aspects of this poor performance is the excess of bureaucracy that just kills every single productivity effector you may have in place. So click about that and go with the mindset of keeping things simple. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and see you next week with another five minutes, Podcast.
